Hitler's peace

At the end of a long corridor, I entered a door and found a set of stairs leading to a laundry room, a wine cellar stocked with some very choice vintages, and several storerooms that were filled mostly with old paintings. There were one or two pictures I recognized from Elena’s house in Berlin and various pieces of dusty-looking Biedermeier furniture.

I tiptoed back up to the second floor, where I checked that Elena was still sleeping before opening the doors to some of the other rooms. One set of double doors revealed a whole stone staircase and, at the top of this, another door that led into what looked like an apartment complete with drawing room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and library. There was even a sort of tower with bars on the windows. Just the place to lock up a mad prince or two.

I was about to call off the search and return to the bedroom when my eye caught sight of a book on one of the shelves. It was my own book, On Being Empirical, and, much to my surprise, I found that it had been substantially annotated. I could not understand the annotations, which were in Polish, but I did recognize Elena’s handwriting. And yet she had given me the impression that my book had been beyond her understanding. This hardly counted as evidence of anything except perhaps that she was a lot cleverer than I had always supposed.

But then I noticed a small curving mark on the carpet that ran from the corner of the bookcase toward the wall beside it-almost as if the bookcase itself was regularly shifted. Taking hold of the side of the case, I tugged at it gently, only to find it was also a door.

As I advanced into the darkness behind the bookcase, I noticed a smell. It was the same smell I had detected in the drawing room the previous afternoon. American cigarettes, Old Spice, and brilliantine. I reached out for a light switch and saw a room about ten feet square. The room was equipped with a chair and a table on which a lamp and a German radio stood. I recognized the radio immediately, for it had been one of the first things they had shown us on the OSS induction training course at Catoctin Mountain. One of the eight German agents arrested on Long Island in July 1942 had been equipped with just such a radio. It was standard Abwehr issue, an SE100/11 with the controls all printed in English to try and disguise it. The disguise might have fooled a civilian but not someone who was in the trade. Back in the States, just possessing a sender/receiver was enough to get you the electric chair.

On the table in front of the radio was a little Walther PPK automatic. It seemed to make clear that Elena meant business. If it really was her gun. The masculine scent in the room suggested she had another confederate besides Major Reichleitner. I picked up the pistol. Turning it upside down, I ejected the magazine from the plastic grip. The gun was loaded, not that I had expected otherwise. I shoved the magazine back into the handle and laid it down on the table.

I tiptoed back to the top of the stone stairs for a moment to check that my dirty little mission was still a secret. And it was about then that I had the sudden sensation I was being watched. I remained standing there for several minutes before concluding I had imagined it, and returned to the secret radio room.

I sat on the chair, reached underneath the table, and drew a metallic wastepaper bin toward me. It was full of paper. I placed it between my naked thighs and began to examine the contents. It showed a great want of vigilance not to have set alight the cellophane sheets intended to help burn any plaintext messages sent or received. Abwehr agents, even the ones from Long Island, were usually not so careless. Perhaps the secret room itself had lulled Elena into a false sense of security about normal spycraft. Or perhaps the lack of a window.

I fished a message out of the bin, spread the paper flat on the table, glanced over it, and then folded it up so that I could read it later. I was about to return the wastepaper bin to its place underneath the table when something else caught my eye.

It was an empty package of Kools. Kools were a mentholated American brand of cigarettes that neither I nor Elena smoked. Smoking Kools was like smoking a stick of chewing gum. Even more interesting was what I found crushed up inside the empty packet. It was a matchbook with only one match left. It was from the Hamilton Hotel in Washington. The Hamilton Hotel overlooked Franklin Park, where Thornton Cole’s body had been found. Finding this matchbook in the same room as an SE100 radio was all the evidence I needed to know that the man who had killed Cole, and very likely Ted Schmidt, too, had occupied the very chair I was sitting in.